Modern European culture and politics have been largely shaped by the century-long material and cognitive relationships with several forms of ethno-anthropological, sociological and cultural diversity according to both a spatial and a temporal dimension. This international collection of essays sweeps over a multiplicity of such cultural experiences according to a global, transcultural outlook, ranging from European encounters with exotic, savage peoples of newly discovered lands of conquest and colonization, to the European nation-State building process. The book is the outcome of the European research project, “EUO-European Culture and the Understanding of Otherness: Historiography, Politics and the Sciences of Man in the Birth of the Modern World (Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries)” conceived and directed by Guido Abbattista with researchers from eleven European universities and sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Education University and Research (Interlink program for 2006-2008).